The jailing of an insurance broker who overcharged Tom Hanks and his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars makes for sensational headlines, but doesn’t reflect the quality of those in the industry, says Dan Danyluk.
“He was a crook – not a broker,” says Danyluk, the CEO of the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada. “This is someone who wasn’t in the business of ethics. He would have been a fraud no matter what line of work he was in, and I don’t think it is indicative of how brokers operate.”
Jerry Goldman, a Southern California insurance broker who overcharged the Hollywood actor Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, was sent to federal prison recently to serve a 27-month sentence, and was ordered to pay $840,000 in restitution.
Prosecutors claimed that between 1998 and 2011, Goldman inflated premiums by as much as 600 per cent and created phoney invoices to hide the scam. The original indictment claimed that Goldman also bilked others, including the former guitarist for The Police, Andy Summers.
“Does he deserve to go to jail? I think so,” Danyluk told Insurance Business. “What goes unnoticed are the millions of transactions of insurance that occur every day, and how few of those involve fraudulent activity.”
The 60-year-old Goldman pleaded guilty in April to the charge of mail fraud involving Hanks and Wilson.
